The huge populations of China and India exceed each different nation on the earth and in The Accountants we’re bombarded with stats projected on an enormous display screen: progress, spending, broadband speeds. However though this present, conceived and directed by artist Keith Khan, purports to be about two dominant world powers, it’s actually a musing on private id, an intimate private drama that makes an attempt to ask the largest questions: who am I, and what ought to I do with my life?
The story is performed out in voice notes and texts between a younger British-Chinese language man, Liam (Josh Hart), and his Indian “aunty” Kash (Shobna Gulati). Liam is off to Asia to seek out himself, and their endearing jokey/profound exchanges are visualised on big cellphone screens on the sides of the stage. Whereas we hearken to them, we additionally see them compulsively Googling on their telephones whereas fast-moving phrases and pictures fill the backdrop and 12 dancers traverse the stage. You don’t know the place to look, eyes darting between shifting objects. It’s an efficient re-enactment of the fashionable mind state, however a dizzying dramatic expertise.
The dancers come from two firms, Xiexin Dance Theatre from Shanghai and Terence Lewis Modern Dance Firm from Mumbai, each making their UK debuts. They first seem in matching wigs and nameless workplace garments: the accountants of the title are figments in Liam’s thoughts, taking inventory of his life.
Whereas Liam and Kash’s voices and characters are sturdy, these dancing our bodies are unmoored from id and imprecise in perform. Xie Xin’s motion comes generally in watery waves and eddies, Lewis and fellow choreographer Mahrukh Dumasia present us sparkles of flavour, however private signatures are laborious to learn. Globalisation right here means a muting of id. On Aviva Studios’ monumental stage the choreography appears underpowered for the house.
It’s an pleasurable and technically spectacular present (the design is by Manchester-based studio idontloveyouanymore) however the dance factor doesn’t add as a lot because it might. Of their chat, Liam and Kash have a recreation of asking one another massive philosophical questions, however they by no means give any solutions. Khan is exploring what it’s to be a second technology immigrant; whether or not id is one thing you will have, or one thing you create, however this journey doesn’t fairly result in enlightenment.
